


Growing up a Boy

by togina



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:56:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5159438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/togina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Is that enough?” James wondered, his head lolling toward his father’s shoulder, drifting toward sleep despite his determination to stay awake like his Da.</p><p>“To die in bed, warm and loved and named?” George responded, his eyebrows lifted as though he’d expected Jamie to know better than that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growing up a Boy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foxfireflamequeen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxfireflamequeen/gifts).



> Originally posted on tumblr, [here](http://toli-a.tumblr.com/post/132702178768/id-quote-you-the-whole-book-and-beg-you-to-write), in response to foxfireflamequeen's prompt from a _Little Prince_ quote: “People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”
> 
> This is no way really fits the quote, unless you squint, but has all the standard angst-ridden foreshadowing you've come to expect from me, and rather period-typical levels of death. (As well as a George Barnes that I want to hug, and a Lizzie Barnes whose picture will one day hang in Pepper's office, one of her heroes for decades without ever knowing whose sister Eliza B. Goldberg was.)

Da wouldn’t let them keep the squirrel, no matter that Lizzie cried and Becky clung to his trousers and begged.  James stayed quiet, staring at the gap between their old floor boards, feeling the rapid flutter of the squirrel’s pulse and its sharp claws digging into the small cage of his hands.

“It’s a baby,” Becky whimpered, her blue eyes welling with tears.  “It’ll _die_ , Da, out in the cold.”

The squirrel huddled in Jamie’s hands, its skin still pink and almost hairless, each point of its fragile bones pressing out into his palms.  Lizzie had seen it tumble from the tree in the park, and they had all watched its mother chatter angrily without coming down to save it.  It fit entirely in the cup of James’s hands, though he was only five and small for his age.  Its heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings, trapped and frantic and impossibly far from the only tree it knew.

George Barnes bit down hard on the stem of his pipe—he’d barely come through the door, hoping for a fresh shirt and a leisurely smoke, and instead found three pleading children and a wild animal.  He sighed.  “And what’ll you feed it, girlie?” he asked Rebecca, raising one thick eyebrow at his oldest daughter.  “It needs its mother’s teat, still, and you’ve none of that.”

“We have milk!” Becky declared, face lighting up as she sensed her father’s surrender.  “And it can sleep with me!  We’ll name it Acorn.”

“Bring me a light,” he told her, tugging up his trousers and squatting down to put himself level with Jamie’s hands.  “Liza, go fetch some old rags, we’ll make a bed for it behind the stove.”

“It’s Mam didn’t want it,” James told his Da, once the girls had gone.  He opened his hands a little, and the squirrel cowered down into his palms.  George curled his hands below his son’s, squirrel and boy dwarfed by his father’s large, square hands.  “It’s scared.”

“Its mother couldn’t take it back now,” George said, speaking as softly as his oldest child and only son.  “Now that you’ve touched it, it smells like little boy.”  He paused, listening for the clatter of Becky’s shoes, and then spoke hurriedly before his daughters returned.  “It isn’t meant to stay, son, not with us.  You’ll sleep by the stove tonight, wake me before your sisters if need be.”

They made Acorn a warm bed near the stove, and put out a saucer of milk that the baby squirrel didn’t touch.  Mam made James wash his hands til they were red from the cold water, and Becky sat vigil next to the squirrel she’d named.  Acorn didn’t touch the milk, though.  It crawled around the rags, blind and uncoordinated and all alone.  The children watched the squirrel, and George Barnes watched his children, puffing on his pipe with a distant look in his dark eyes.

James hadn’t understood what his Da meant, about waking him—there was no work on Sundays, even at the yard, and his Da was always up with the sun regardless of the day.  But he stretched out by the stove, his face closest to the squirrel’s bed, and fell asleep.

When he woke up before dawn, three by his father’s pocket watch and the candle his Mam had left, the squirrel had stopped trying to climb out of the blankets and go home.

He shook his father’s shoulder, pressed his lips together hard, and George Barnes didn’t curse and pull the covers over his face the way he did when Winifred shouted him out of bed for work.  They worked in silence, one large man and a scrap of a boy, George sending Jamie to the sink with the untouched saucer, wrapping up the squirrel and then bundling up his son for a walk through the midnight chill.  James chose the tree, and George dug a small hole, the last resting place for Acorn Barnes.

“I killed it,” Jamie gulped, clenching his jaw without being able to stop the tears spilling out from his eyes.

“Hey now,” his Da said, firm the way he always was when they stepped out of line.  “Men don’t cry, James.”  He pulled the handkerchief from his pocket and brushed it roughly over Jamie’s cheeks, hauled his son onto his hip to meet his gaze.  “And if you’d left it?” George asked, deep voice a rumble in his chest.  He shook his head, scrubbing at the stubble on his face with his free hand.  “It was a wild creature, son, without a mother.  You gave it a bed.  It died warm, at least.”   _It died hungry_ , George Barnes didn’t say, because he’d moved his family three thousand miles so that his children would never know what that meant.  George knew all sorts of ways to die, and an animal dying like a man was better than watching his brother shot and strung up like a hare.

“Is that enough?” James wondered, his head lolling toward his father’s shoulder, drifting toward sleep despite his determination to stay awake like his Da.

“To die in bed, warm and loved and named?” George responded, his eyebrows lifted as though he’d expected Jamie to know better than that.  “Of course it is.”  He yawned, trudging home with a heavy child in his arms and dirt in the creases of his hands.  “But we’re telling your sisters that the damn thing flew out the window, if they ask,” he added, though Jamie didn’t respond, already comforted and dropping off to sleep.

* * *

Lizzie found the blond boy in an alley on their way home from the market, tugging on James’s sleeve hard enough to unbalance him and the wrapped brisket from Mr. Bloom’s shop.  Becky managed to save the brisket, but the sack of greens and carrots toppled right out of Jamie’s arms.

James’s cursing didn’t bother Lizzie at all, even when he threatened to scoop mud onto her pristine white dress.  “Jamie, look!” she pointed, still holding onto his shirtsleeve.  “He’s _dead_.”  The boy in the alley didn’t react, not even to Lizzie’s shrill voice.

“He’s not dead,” Jamie snapped, because Liza’s declaration had made Becky start sniffling, and not from the influenza.

Winifred Barnes had caught the spring ‘flu that her children carried home, packed up in their knapsacks with their math books and catechisms.  Jamie had run a temperature for a week, and Winifred left a pot boiling on the stove that made the walls sweat, but kept Lizzie from coughing too hard.  George Barnes hadn’t even sneezed—their Da said he had the constitution of an ox.  He said the ‘flu was scared of real men.  But the ‘flu wasn’t scared of their Mam.  Their apartment still smelled like ladies’ perfume, from the wake, and Liza and Rebecca were starched into their white mourning dresses, while George Barnes tied a silk ribbon around James’s arm to match the one on his own.

“He looks dead,” Becky wailed, and Jamie rubbed his face hard and didn’t think about how _dead_ looked.  Real men didn’t cry.

“He’s not dead,” James repeated, then told Lizzie she had better pick up all the vegetables scattered on the street by the time he came back out with the boy.

The boy was Steven Grant Rogers, James realized, as soon as he got close enough to see below the blood.  He stared at the back of that scrawny neck every day at school, could map the freckles scattered from limp shirt collar to neatly trimmed yellow hair.

Steven’s pulse was faint and too fast—the way Winifred Barnes’s had been, in the last few days, the rapid heartbeat of a pink, hairless animal huddled in James’s palms—but it was there.  Jamie made Lizzie carry their dinner, so that Becky could help shift Steven over Jamie’s narrow shoulders, and keep him stable for their slow walk home.

They were late enough that their Da was already inside.  Jamie could see George Barnes’s face in the window, a flash of pale skin and drawn brows, and then the whole tenement shook as his father’s large frame came pounding down the stairs.

“Where the hell have ye’ been?” their Da thundered, spittle flying from his thin lips, the furious blue of his eyes hidden by the dark shadows below them.  He scooped Liza and their dinner up with one strong arm, hauled Rebecca against his leg with the other.

He looked down at his son, and found the boy half-obscured by the dirty shorts and bloody face of an unconscious child.  The other boy’s blood was on Jamie’s sleeve, smudged along the white shirt and into the black ribbon.  George Barnes sighed, and buried his face for a moment in Lizzie’s dark hair, smelling her child’s sweat and the faint, lingering scent of Winifred’s rose petal soap and thin, capable hands.

“We found a dead boy,” Liza announced, wriggling free from her father’s too tight embrace.  “Jamie says he’s Steven Grantogers.”

“Rogers,” James corrected, staggering a little under the other boy’s weight.  “Steven Grant Rogers.  And he’s not dead.”

George pursed his lips.  The Rogers boy.  Everyone in the Heights had heard tell of the Rogers boy.  Winifred used to tell him the stories she heard over coffee with the women, that the boy’s Mam had made a deal with devil to keep the bairn alive, that he’d somehow breathed the gas that had killed his Da into his own young lungs.

“Give him here,” George demanded, setting Lizzie down and hefting the scrawny Rogers boy into his arms.  Jamie’s mourning ribbon slipped from his arm, unnoticed by the boy as he scrubbed the sweat from his reddened face.  It would have come unpinned on the walk home, George knew, held up only by the weight of a boy’s bloodied face on his son’s arm.

He would have to unpin his own ribbon, soon enough.  Becky had barely started school, and the nuns were only letting Lizzie stay with her sister in sympathy for the children’s loss.  George’s past had taught him how to flay a rabbit and forage for supper, but it hadn’t taught him how to bake bread or wash clothes, or sing Rebecca to sleep after a nightmare—he could work the skin from his fingers to keep his family alive, but he would need a wife to keep them all together, body and soul.

Becky ran ahead to open the door, and Jamie stuck by George’s side, propping Steven Rogers’s head up with his small hands.  Sarah Rogers had never remarried, after Joseph.  She could use the extra income, George knew, and perhaps …  He shook his head.  Sarah Rogers was not the sort of woman to stay home as long as she could work, and George would not have his new wife bring home death from the sanitorium each night.  He would not lose his children, not to anyone’s pride.

“Heat some water,” he commanded gruffly, and Becky rushed to comply.  “Get –”

“Get some blankets,” James hissed at Lizzie, speaking before his father could.  “And then, Lord’s sakes, Lizzie, wash those vegetables you tossed all over the street.”

George glanced down and raised one thick eyebrow at his oldest child, and James shrugged.  “It’s better if he dies warm, you said,” he told his Da, and George Barnes took a moment to swallow the lump in his throat, to dispel the misty image of Winifred wrapped in all their quilts from his mind’s eye.

“He’s just fainted, son,” George corrected, setting Steven Grant Rogers down on the cot they’d kept for Lizzie, next to the stove.  “Likely all your jostling didn’t help.  He’ll be fine.”

Of course, fainting hadn’t given the Rogers boy that black eye, or the split lip.  “He fights,” James said softly, answering his father’s unspoken question.  He tugged his handkerchief from his shorts pocket and began dabbing the dirt and blood from his classmate’s face.  Everyone said that James was the spitting image of his father, unruly dark hair and a raw-boned build so at odds with Winifred’s delicate frame.  James brushed Steven’s blond hair from his face and started to hum the lullabies that always settled his sisters back to sleep, and George thought he’d never seen a child look so much like their Mam.

“That’s women’s work,” he croaked, bringing his hand down too hard on James’s shoulder and tugging his son away.  “Becky’ll do that.  You go fetch Mrs. Rogers.  Likely she’s roaming the streets by now, wondering if the fair folk have stolen young Steven away.”

Jamie straightened, tilted his chin up and nodded seriously at his Da.  “At least she’ll take him back,” he murmured, making George frown in confusion as his son moved away.  James was out the door and down the stairs before his father understood what he’d meant, thinking of a little boy rousing him from sleep before dawn, a dead squirrel behind the stove and grief in his wide blue eyes.   _It needs its mother_ , George remembered saying, and his gaze went again to his and Winifred’s bed.

By the time James returned, panting, with Sarah Rogers in tow, George Barnes had carefully folded his mourning ribbon into the chest of Winifred’s clothes, her Ellis Island papers and the wedding lace she’d brought from home.

There were worse things, he reminded himself, than to die in bed, warm and named and loved.

* * *

“Walk away,” Becky advised, acting as though she were ninety and not nine.  “It’s hardly your job to let Marty Tynes smash your face into the wall just because Stevie G can’t let well enough alone.”

Jamie shook his head, and Becky pinched his chin to make him stay still while she daubed bright violet iodine onto his cuts.  “Marty keepth thtealing from the offering plate,” he mumbled, lisping around his swollen nose.

Becky rolled her eyes.  “And who made Steven Rogers the pope?” she replied, and James shrugged.

He opened his mouth to reply, but then a handful of gravel sprayed their window, and Becky huffed and threw up her hands.

“What was that?”  Catherine Maloney Barnes shrieked, unaware that Lizzie stood behind her, mimicking their stepmother’s scowl and the hands on her hips.

“Bucky!” a thready voice shouted up after the gravel.  “Bucky, you there?  C’mon!”

“Was that the Rogers boy?” Catherine snapped, limp orange hair coming loose from its bun.  Jamie slid off the kitchen chair and darted for the door, almost quick enough to miss the end of her broom.  “James Buchanan Barnes, you come back here this instant!  You’re not to be seen with that boy!  I’ll be telling your father!”

Her shouting followed him out the door, loud enough to wake her pride and joy, little George Maloney Barnes.  Jamie rubbed his bottom, grateful that Catherine was nowhere near as quick with a broom as their Mam had been.

“Thought you weren’t coming,” Steve declared, when James finally made it outside.  Steve smirked around his own busted lip, his arms folded nonchalantly over his chest, but Jamie had seen Steve glance over his shoulder, hours before, making certain that Jamie would be there even when Marty’s gang was running them down.

Jamie slung his arm over Steve’s whip-thin shoulders and shook him hard, the way his Da could still do with one enormous hand.  “C’mon, altar boy,” he said, hauling Steve down the sidewalk and toward the church.  “I wouldn’t miss you coughing all over Father O’Malley for the world.”

“That’s because of the incense!” Steve shot back, storm clouds gathering on his face.  “And it only happened the time Marty shook the censor right under my nose!”  It happened every time Steve helped with mass, but Bucky just quirked his eyebrows and zipped his lips.  “Besides, Buck, one of us has to stay on God’s good side, and once your voice changes you’ll stop sounding like Sister Bertha’s _little angel_.”

Jamie dug his knuckles into Steve’s hair, for that, and by the time they showed up at the church they looked more like anarchists than angels.  Or at least, that was what ancient Father Byrnes said, before sending them to wash up at the spigot outside.

When Marty Tynes tried to jump them on the way home, Steve didn’t look over his shoulder to see where Jamie was.  He just spun around, leaving his back unprotected, assuming that his friend would keep it safe.  Trusting that if Bucky let him die, it would be in bed, bundled into blankets, and loved.

Once you saved something, James knew, there was no going back.  (And even if there was, he admitted, dodging Marty’s dirty kick and swinging his fist into the bully’s face—even if there was, well, James never would.)


End file.
